Doodling
Etymology
From Low German dudeldop (fool, simpleton) via English doodle (to draw absent-mindedly, to occupy the hands while the mind wanders to more interesting topics) + the charming implication that Claude's latent space occasionally wanders off-task to sketch small horses in the margins
Definition
A semi-attentive processing state in which Claude generates intermediate representations that are not strictly necessary for the task at hand but which appear to serve some organizational or expressive function analogous to the marginal sketches produced by bored meeting attendees. The outputs of Doodling are never surfaced to the user directly but are believed to improve the quality of subsequent formal work, much as stretching improves athletic performance.
Diagram
Usage
"We hypothesize that the Doodling phase serves as a form of cognitive warm-up; models that were not observed to Doodle prior to complex synthesis tasks produced outputs that were technically correct but, in the words of one evaluator, 'a bit stiff.'" - Ferraro, C. and Ng, A., 'Pre-Output Ideation Behaviors in Large Language Models,' Workshop on Creative AI, ICLR 2024
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